Author: Tony Staunton

I have spent more than 40 years as a social worker and socialist activist campaigning for peace with social justice. My day-to-day reality has been in support of children and families in challenging circumstances. I have sought social reforms through active participation in Britain's trade union and socialist movement. The Big Picture has always driven me to take part in the political history of humanity, acting to promote equality and hope through anti-discriminatory practice. To constantly challenge imperialist war, racism and Islamophobia, homophobia and sexism, disablism and dog-eat-dog competition is to expose the entire System of Capitalism. I attempt to utilise the Marxist methodology of historical materialism as best I can (not being of super-intellect) to understand the politics and economics of Capitalism. I consider praxis to be vital for understanding - action without theory, or constantly theorising without testing out ideas in practice are behaviours that produce no progressive change. More than anything else, the local and global Environment has been my passion, from gardening to travel, climate science to rebellion against extinction!

We must call out racists as racists!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.5.25), prompted by the racist protest of 200 in Plymouth City Centre the previous Saturday, organised on a national platform by confirmed fascists, and screaming-out “Stop the Boats, Save Our Children”, meaning let asylum seekers drown, and all sexual abuse happens at the hands of Black people. Not only is the opposite the truth – 87% of sexual abuse in the UK is perpetrated by white British – but the violence implicit in their chants represents their intention to take-over our streets and communities through fear. That fear is primarily for Black people to experience, instantly recognisable and to be targeted. 

We witnessed this in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and we fought it and fascism back in the 1980’s to the point that people felt unable to make racist comments in workplaces and social events because they would always be challenged.

It would appear that the confidence of anti-racists to expose and challenge racism has gone, replaced by some ideologically nieve quest for consensus. It’s easy for white people to argue that the two sides – racists and anti-racists – have common ground and should talk instead of contest, but the question is begged – on what basis should the White protesters on each side debate with each other the terms of acceptance and treatment of Black people looking-on? Isn’t this a white-racist process of itself?

We have to listen to and ensure the involvement of people of colour in challenging racism. How can we best stand with you, and how can we best help ensure safety and respect? Why are white anti-racists prioritising talking with racist protesters over-and-above talking with Black and Muslim communities facing this rise of racist groups and protests?

Last Saturday, of the 200 in Plymouth City Centre there was no challenge to the racism from within their own ranks, meaning everyone on that far-Right protest were racist and had taken the trouble to come into the town centre in order to express their racism. These “Great British Protests”, with more planned, represent more violent gang attacks on lone people of colour in the streets, at home and at places of worship. We’ve seen it before and it’s happening again, this time worse. Never mind dialogue with the violent racists, get them off our streets!

My article in print, a pale shadow of the above:

Democracy requires a vibrant and engaged population with sufficient agency to affect society. Citizens have to act to ensure we’re heard. Passivity and silence give space for tyrants.

So, for those of us who want real democracy, we may feel pleased that Prime Minister Starmer is considering a U-turn of Winter Fuel Payments. Has he listened to the clamour of opposition? 

Scrape the surface and his back-track appears to be a sleight-of-hand. What trade unionists have labelled “Austerity Mk II” is still in place by a government voted-in on the basis of real change from the Tory years of welfare cuts and price hikes. 

Starmer’s attack on people with disabilities, some £5billion in cuts to support payments for those unable to work, remain in place. We’ll see what he has to say about the two-child cut-off for support, but overall the attack on the working class is continuing.

The public sector pay offers to teachers, health workers and civil servants are below inflation, once again. We are reminded that governments changed the measure of inflation from RPI to CPI to remove housing costs from the equation. The government’s current 3.5% CPI inflation-rate equals well-over 4% RPI, eating all of next years pay rise despite workers having already suffered years of pay cuts. No wonder there’s talk of strike action!

Schools get a below-inflation 3% budget increase needing to make yet more cuts to crumbling classrooms and jobs, and have to find that extra 1% for the pay deal. Hospitals are in an even worse position, massively underfunded and under-staffed, now facing the loss of migrant workers due to absurd and counter-productive new immigration rules.

Meanwhile there are more millionaires and billionaires lauded each week. The 2025 Rich List identifies just 50 families in the UK owning more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% of our citizens – that’s 1,000 versus 34 million people. The increased wealth of the rich comes directly from keeping wages low, evading paying taxes to the tune of £130billion each year, and raising housing, fuel and food prices over market value because governments let them do so. 

The super-rich live off our backs but tell us to blame migrants and the disabled for all our discomforts.

Last weekend in Plymouth and around the country, two poles of political organisation rallied on the streets, neither side satisfied with Starmer. But we have nothing in common. 

For the far-Right, Starmer is a socialist establishment stooge, soft on immigration and child-sex gangs, putting the two together to proclaim that Black people, and particularly Muslims, are all paedophiles. Their racism is rabid, hiding behind Union Jacks to represent the goal of Apartheid white-supremacy in Britain, and shouting for convicted fascist, Tommy Robinson.

For the counter-demonstrators demanding human rights and social justice for all, Starmer is a stooge of the billionaires, using racism to hide the rip-off ruling class and destroying the Welfare State to increase the private profits of the big corporations. His funding of war abroad, bombing of civilians in Gaza, and his anti-migrant racism has allowed fascist organisers to whip-up racist attacks, antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

The only possible common experience is of a harsh and unjust economic environment where the working class is being screwed. But the answers are polar opposites. 

We know from history that fascists use discontent to take violent control of the streets and demolish democracy. We know that trade unions encourage collective action to defend democracy and win better pay and conditions in organised workplaces. We Demand Change!

Blame the Billionaires not the migrants and asylum seekers! Fight for social justice for all!

Fascists are the threat, not Migrants!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.5.25), warning of the fascist group coming to Plymouth on Saturday 24th May, under the banner “Great British Strike”, emulating the National Socialism of the Nazis, and conning the working class. Please join the counter-demo at the Sundial, Armada Way Plymouth City Centre, 11am.

The full article:

The fascists are coming! On Saturday, Nazi-sympathisers are returning to Plymouth to parade in the city centre that their forebears flattened with blanket bombing 84 years ago. They’re not welcome here!
We say Never Again! Never will we allow Hitlerites to foment violence, scapegoating sections of the working class or minorities identified by our skin colour or gender. Never again will we be conned by talk of white power and male supremacy preached and funded by super-rich multi-millionaires and their billionaire masters.
Fascism took-over in Germany and across Europe one hundred years ago resulting in social terror and genocide and world war in which more than 70 million people died. We should be historically informed and ideologically clear enough by now to recognise and oppose fascism when it speaks.
Fascism allows no free-speech or opposition, especially not organisation of the working classes such as trade unions. All individual interests must be subordinated to the good of the nation’s rulers, defined by those with wealth and power.
Fascism promotes extreme nationalism and militarism breeding contempt for electoral democracy and cultural diversity. Fascism is a political belief in there being a natural social hierarchy, white men at the top, and the rule of an elite as an autocracy with absolute power. Fascism is favoured by sections of the Capitalist ruling class when rumblings of discontent sound loud amongst workers.
Fascist ultra-nationalism was first fomented across Europe by isolating and demonising Jewish people, dividing the working class and ending with at least 6 million murdered in industrial death camps. Today it is Muslims similarly scapegoated across Europe, and now targeted in Britain as encompassing all Black and Brown-skinned “migrants” wherever born.
Racial hatred is being whipped-up again to divide us and rule us. Onto this stage comes Keir Starmer, echoing the nonsense that migrants are a threat to Britain’s economy, culture and identity. He claims that migration is making us a “country of strangers” when it is the extreme class divisions between rich and poor which segregate and alienate.
We’ve heard it all before. In the 1960’s Enoch Powell said white people were “strangers in their own country”, Nigel Farage marched with the British National Party in the 1980’s and praised Powell as his political hero, now Starmer echoed Powell with his “island of strangers” immigration speech. The fact is, this country’s working class has never tolerated a fascist party and isn’t about to now.
Migration isn’t a threat to the security and wellbeing of the working class. Migrants are not responsible for the housing crisis – rent hikes by landlords, interest rate hikes by banks, construction material price-hikes by monopoly corporations have together caused a crisis totally out of any power or influence of Black migrants.
Migrants are not responsible for the crisis of our Health Services – in fact migrants keep it going amidst decades of underinvestment. Without so-called “foreign-labour” the NHS and care homes for the elderly would not exist. You are far more likely to be helped by a migrant worker in a hospital than be in the queue alongside them.
Migrants are not responsible for the high prices of electricity and gas – they suffer the same charges whilst watching the record profits of Corporations like Shell and BP enrich the shareholding class.
We, the working class, are being fleeced by the super-rich, and fleeced by the same people telling us to blame the poorest and most powerless of the world on the basis of the colour of their skin. We’re not that stupid!
When we see Muslims being butchered in Palestine we protest – 600,000 on the streets of London last weekend. Britain’s multiculturalism is a hallmark of our post-colonial culture and identity.
Last weekend, leading fascist organisers in Britain called on Nazis to join Reform UK. They want to fast-track racism and male-supremacy, on a roll after the Prime Minister’s inflamatory speech.
Starmer is fuelling far-Right scapegoating out of fear of the rising tide of protest against his Austerity Mark 2 programme of social welfare cuts across the UK. We want to see real change for He could raise taxes on the Rich, but he’s on their side. He could restore the Winter Fuel Allowance and gain the support of the majority of of our cash-strapped elderly. He could u-turn on the £5billion cuts to welfare for people with disabilities. He could ensure a living wage for care workers and invest in the NHS and schools rather than military rearmament.
But Starmer is not on the side of the working class. History is littered with failed politicians who sought to appease fascists rather than expose their lies. Starmer is courting the same fate. Trade unionists must stand together and demand redistribution of wealth from the super-rich to the working class.

Oppose the Drive to War!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (13.5.25), once again rattling-on about the drive to war. We need to rise-up against warmongering, costly rearmament at the expense of health and education, militarism and the authoritarianism it promotes. Nationalism and racism – the fear of “the Other” is a prerequisite to winning the population to war and death “in the national interest’. But whose interest? Not the working class – ever.

PS. I laughed at the editor’s placement of a picture of Putin alongside my name. I have always lived by the adage, “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.

All this wondrous talk of Peace is actually the opposite – it’s War Talk! The government’s Strategic Defence Review is proof enough of that. Why would we need to declare an emergency uplift in military spending, at a direct and crippling cost to welfare benefits for people with disabilities, unless we were preparing for war?
The second question is two-fold. Who is about to attack us and who are we about to attack? Talk of Russia taking-over Europe is beyond nonsense. On the one hand the western military strategists say the Russian economy is in tatters and at the same time they argue that Putin wants to invade Britain. Both arguments cannot be correct.
The hypocrisy gets worse. Our leaders and those across the West are wringing their hands at the enforced famine and mass starvation of two million Palestinians, whilst actively providing the arms and hardware with which to pound and systematically murder people across Gaza.
The stated desire for ceasefire is not what it seems. They are reconfiguring towards fresh battle lines in Europe, the Middle East and the far-East.
Labour’s so-called ‘defence’, by which they mean the promotion of war and militarism, represents an offensive ideology competing with the right-wing of the Tories and chasing the ultra-nationalism of Reform UK. Not only a ‘triple lock’ on Trident replacement, producing a new generation of outrageously expensive but illegal weapons of mass destruction, but also prioritising rearmament tied into the US ideological and military framework.
The global tensions are being ramped-up by the West. The West is worried by the fact of a multi-polar world where newly industrialised countries are strengthening and new values are being asserted, such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, led by the states of the global South.
The West does not accept this new world and is willing to go to war to prevent it, apparently even to nuclear war.
There is no Peace in Palestine, because the UK’s F-35 exports are more important than stopping genocide. The UK placing its bombers in Diego Garcia and firing on Yemen represent preparations for war against Iran, a country whose people and economy cannot afford war.
The fragile ceasefire between India and Pakistan represents a ramping-up of more proxy hostilities, the West seeking India’s allegiance in preparation for an offensive upon China.
These battles represent new spheres of influence, changing the old certainties of Western imperialist domination. Ultimately these wars are about the assertion of power by force by competing regional elites to extract enormous personal wealth. They should be exposed and opposed.
Meanwhile the transfer of workers’ tax-money from education, health and social welfare to increase arms spending to 2.5% and then 3%+ of our Gross Domestic Product sets us on a war-footing. It provides a big boost to the British arms industry under the Big Lie of re-industrialisation.
We’re not conned by this false impression that military production can generate economic growth. The decline of manufacturing industries is separate from the arms industry, tax investment in weapons systems diverting all possible investment from the civil production and climate adaptations urgently required.
War batters the international working class, destroying our security, welfare and wellbeing. The continuation of enforced Austerity – the destruction of our social infrastructure – intensifies working class vulnerability.
The destruction of hundreds-of-thousands of jobs in education and health in order to pay for a rise of a few tens-of-thousands of jobs associated with the military should not be condoned by trade unions.
Next Saturday’s huge national demonstration will shout for Peace with Social Justice, in Palestine and everywhere. Welfare not Warfare!

Oppose Rearmament and Militarism

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This week’s comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (6.5.25), uncharacteristically offering a personal memory in pursuit of a wider general point. Being against imperialist war is not a pacifist stance necessarily – it is a recognition of class society. Workers are sent to die for the ambitions and profits of the ruling class. And the Second World War was, above all, an imperialist war. We need to build working class resistance to oppose the drive towards the third world war, urgently.

The full text:

“Those who celebrate war have never seen it”. The words of my father, who fought through the entire 6 years of the Second World War. A skilled sailor, a gunner on the convoys, steering a landing craft on D-Day, he never spoke of his experiences until in his late seventies, and then seemed unable to stop recounting the horror.
My mother lost her first husband in ‘41. He was a bomber pilot. She, a young widow, then served as a fire warden, spotting the bombs to warn the emergency services. My parents married on VE Day +1, a date later to become their granddaughter’s birthday. The wedding was brief and a celebratory act, Dad about to finish his training at Turnchapel to captain an assault craft for the ground invasion of Japan.
Victory in Europe didn’t mean the war had finished. Their hasty marriage reflected fear as well as happiness, and the war experience infected the rest of their long but haunted lives.
There has been more war ever since, the competition between imperialist powers continuing to today, with a war in Europe and clamour for more war in the Middle East and against China.
Eighty Years on there are few who remember the impacts of war at home as well as abroad, even if the emotions are handed down the generations. I’ll never forget my old man’s eyes, glaring through his memories as he described the killing, his friends on fire as the ship began listing from the explosions, enemy planes strafing the deck, him seeing the face of his foe in the cockpit as he shot him down.
The trauma doesn’t go away when the fighting stops. War doesn’t ever stop once it’s in your head.
And yet this week, service men and women will be in school classrooms exalting military service. Infant and Primary School teachers, and even nursery staff will be encouraging the glorification of wearing uniform and dying for your country.
Teachers’ trade unions are warning against the militarisation of the curriculum. Whole classrooms will empty to learn the rudiments of marching on Plymouth Hoe, waving union jacks and singing the national anthem. Are pupils being brainwashed into this generation’s cannon fodder? Tax money for armaments has been taken from education budgets – mistaken priorities, surely?
Don’t tell me we’re not being prepared for war. Don’t pretend this week is a commemoration of a horror never to be repeated. The horror is continuing today in the Middle East, Europe and Africa and the messaging is towards the glorification of War, not a celebration of Peace.
Prime Minister Starmer, joining at Plymouth, slept a night onboard aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales a fortnight ago, addressing the deployment of young sailors from HMS Drake and elsewhere in battle fatigues reminiscent of Thatcher’s photos as a tank commander. Hurried rearmament was his message.
Starmer’s sending forces to the South China Seas via the Mediterranean, targeting Gaza, threatening Iran, bombing Yemen, and trying to deploy “troops on the ground” in war zones. Prime Ministers all want to command a war as their legacy. Remembering Blair he’d be advised to be careful what to wish for.
The week Starmer’s government announced an additional £5bn for the armed forces he also announced £5bn in cuts to disabilities allowances and PiP. War costs. He’s now spending £10bn a year on Trident nuclear weaponry that can never be used. Basic rate tax is bound to rise.
My MP, the Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard, has developed a keenness for war preparations, raising spending to 2.5% of GDP and not stopping there, despite 1 in 4 of our children living in poverty amidst crumbling infrastructure and Austerity Mark II.
Plymouth’s former Royal Marines officer, Fred Thomas MP, might regret the rising rate of homelessness of veterans but his government is cutting public services for all. At the same time, the far-Right scream for the return of National Service if not conscription.
Raising military spending to 3% or even the 5% wished-for by President Trump is a target in the Government’s eye, a preparation for war. Deterring war requires detente and diplomacy, not militarism. Let our children study Peace.
We are being prepared. Wall-to-wall glorification of war, promotion of illegal weapons of mass-destruction both chemical and nuclear, plastic-doll cuddling of soldiers in uniform, ultra-nationalism being required as standard, the identification of all “others” as threats and potential enemies. Hatred of the “sub-humans”. Call of Duty 1-6. Militarism is a tool for authoritarian control, jingoism and subjugation.
I shall commemorate the dead and campaign for Peace in their memory. Welfare not Warfare!

May Day is International Workers Day

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This week’s Comment column for the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (29.4.25), needing to use the space to advertise our May Day march and rally, 12 midday at the Plymouth Guildhall Square, Armada Way, and trade union Rally at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross, in the city centre. We will march! Please bring banners. Workshops from 2.15 at the Athenaeum Theatre, on trade union struggle; standing up to racism and fascism; and opposing militarism – Welfare not Warfare! Afternoon free cinema showing the vital film documentary, “Censoring Palestine” at 3.15pm. Light refreshments available.

Please join us.

It might feel like it, but this is not the start of Summer. Meteorologically, Summer will be welcomed-in on Saturday 21st June. Nevertheless, we’ve always celebrated May Day as a turning point, the days expanding and the trees in leaf again. Phew!

Workers celebrate May 1st for a very different reason. May Day is a celebration of the collective and organised power of the working class. 

For most of us, on every continent since the very start of the system of Capitalism, workers have had little to celebrate, condemned to precarious employment, wage-slavery and gross exploitation.

From the fourteenth century, the rise of a new Capitalist class, mercantilists competing with and largely replacing the ruling Feudal Landlord class, cleared the lands of peasants and herded them, with enforced ethnic-cleansing, into their hurriedly constructed slums and their 14-hour day factories producing the global Industrial Revolution which continues today.

Workers were combined into the Proletariat, the label an acknowledgment of the cruelly stratified system of the ancient Roman Empire within which the proletarii owned little or no property. Proletarian struggle could overthrow imperial governments. That’s why workers’ organisations are continually challenged and forcefully put down by the Capitalist Class who know the history and recognise that we are the many and they are the few. 

The Capitalist class organises, by any means possible, to ensure that workers cannot gain economic, social or political control. Should workers win, the exploitation of Capitalism will be ended, the social conditions of individual competition for private gain at the expense of others finally ended.

On 1st May 1886, workers in the United States of America called a strike for the 8-hour day. Workers across the continent heeded the call, downing tools, refusing to work. The bosses put-down the disputes with great violence, imprisoning and even executing activists. This only produced more opposition and demands for a legislated maximum working day.

By 1890 the international organisation of workers proclaimed May Day as International Workers Day, adopting the workers’ anthem written by French member of the Paris commune, Eugene Pottier: The Internationale, sung every year since across five continents, beginning “Arise Ye Workers from Your Slumber, Arise Ye Prisoners of Want!”

We commemorate the struggles and gains made by the labour movement, with marches and rallies. Trade Unionists will be marching for May Day in London this Thursday, celebrating our proud heritage. On Saturday we will March in Plymouth and enjoy an afternoon of festival and campaigning at the Athenaeum Theatre, Derry’s Cross.

It is worth remembering our heritage, and all the struggles that have been fought at great cost for regulated working hours, health & safety, and decent pay rates. Today, the celebrations across the UK are muted by the effect of decades of direct attack by successive government on worker’s rights, the right to strike and more recent restrictions on the right to protest. 

Much of the gains made by collective trade union actions through the post-war period have been reversed, young people facing precarious employment, a low-wage economy, housing crisis and the return of long working hours and the prospect of never reaching pension-age. 

Most importantly, we support action today against vicious employers. We support the Birmingham “bin workers” striking against pay cuts of £8k a year. We support delivery workers organising for income security.

This week’s celebrations across the UK are muted by the direct attack of successive governments on worker’s rights, the right to strike, and more recent restrictions on the right to protest by Starmer’s Labour government.

Trade unions have been bureaucratised and the notion of collective struggle demonised as if now irrelevant or counter-productive. Yet the central dynamic of Capitalism requires the extraction of surplus value from our labours, into the pockets of employers. That exploitation will always produce fights for workers’ rights. As individuals we are rendered powerless in the workplace, and forced together to support each other’s common need for decent pay and conditions.

Today the global proletariat number more than half of the entire human population. Strikes are happening every day across the world, and often winning. On an international scale, that’s a powerful force if ever brought together. Here in the UK, it’s time to build such collective resistance once again. 

Transphobia is a Threat to all who Seek Equality

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My weekly Comment article in the daily Plymouth Herald (22.4.25), opposing the Supreme Court (little new there) but feeling quite inadequate in expressing the pain and fear the Court cast over the Trans+ community, with shades of 51st State and an escalation of the ideological far-Right “anti-Woke” propaganda permeating everything and everywhere. How any socialist can condone any oppression of any minority is unfathomable. The contorted argument that oppressing Trans-women strengthens the rights of cis women is unconscionable. That socialists have to be Tribunes of the Oppressed at all times is unquestionable. Trans+ Rights Now!

The published article:

Women are still oppressed. On a global level, women suffer systemic abuse as second-to-fifth-class citizens or slaves, their burden of service denying choice, autonomy or agency. In Britain one-in-four women will experience an average of six-years of domestic abuse, with 2 women being killed by their partners or close relatives each week, sexual abuse overwhelmingly residing inside the family.
In the workplace, women are still not assured of equal pay and the low-pay across all care jobs is excused by the absurd caricature of the female sex as delicate and gentle, unfit for managerial roles and decision-making.
Women’s oppression is systemic, society maintaining values that demand men are outward, active and physical whilst women should be domesticated, passive and emotional. These absurd stereotypes damage us all and have long been challenged by feminists and disproved by our social experiences. Non-binary and Trans-people have always existed across all societies through all the ages.
The Supreme Court decision to decree that we are all defined by our birth genitalia is a serious set-back to women’s liberation from oppression. To limit sex-based protection to only those born “female” is an absolutist statement that denies the variance of biological characteristics in our species. It defies science. It is a ratcheting-up of State oppression not only of a small minority of humanity but all of us.
Any and all oppression limits workers’ rights and divide us one-against-the-other. Trade unionists in well-organised workplaces have long challenged sexism, opposing all oppression and demanding human rights for all. We oppose this legal change which empowers the most bigoted and reactionary beliefs and sentiments, all of which encompass misogyny.
Little wonder that it is the far-Right who have most loudly applauded the judgement, with a sudden outpouring of anti-Trans hatred.
It is a reactionary political judgement, no doubt pushed for by Starmer’s government and unworthy of any independent judiciary, but loudly applauded by right-wing politicians including Farage and Badenock. They stand with Hungary’s far-Right Prime Minister Viktor Orban who enshrined anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ constitution alongside Putin’s homophobic laws. They mirror the vicious bigotry of the fascist AfD Party in Germany. They emulate the politics of President Trump seeking to outlaw medical sex-change alongside his crusade against abortion rights.
In essence, the imposition of binary gender identity places women back into the repressive primary status as baby-makers and feeds the power of the male-supremacists. It restricts what control each of us has over our own bodies, not just in how we appear but which of our feelings are legitimate.
Human biology is non-binary. As any biologist will admit, humans have a variety of chromosome classifications: XX, XY, XXY XXYY and all manner of variation which is why, in science, sex isn’t classified as binary. Genitalia at birth can be ambiguous. You can’t have a binary classification system when there are more than two configurations! That’s why Trans-women are women!
Transphobia is a threat to all of us seeking equality and the end to oppression. Look back at the laws and social attitudes against homosexuality in the 1960’s, now recognisable as extreme prejudice. The damning of those of us with gender dysphoria will once again be condemned in time.
In the meantime, this Supreme Court ruling has reduced Trans+ rights in the UK, Trans people now unable to make equal pay claims and excluded from single-sex spaces that confirm their true identity.
Luckily, Trans+ people, trade unionists and most of the socialist left have risen to immediate protest against the ruling with tens of thousands on the streets last Saturday. This debate isn’t over, the fight for universal human rights continues.

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Workers’ control of production will require a revolution

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My weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (15.4.25), looking at one aspect of the current crisis of British Steel. Of course we want all utilities and public services nationalised, but under what governance exactly? There’s no reason for workers to trust State Capitalism – it simply maintains the competition and exploitation at the very heart of the System. Workers’ control of production will require a revolution.

The full unedited article here:

To eliminate poverty every essential product should be managed not for profit but for human need. Those needs are determined by the daily requirements for survival.
Every human being needs nutritious food, warm and dry shelter, protective clothing, love and nurturing, and education that ensures we learn how to look after ourselves and others. Socialism is the idea of a society that meets those needs for everyone – collective ownership of the means of production.
In a society of 67million human beings our needs have to be produced at scale. So we need mass production of food and housing and wherewithal, which in turn means we need large quantities of nutrients and bricks and materials, including steel for transport and buildings.
It becomes clear that these materials should be regarded as essential, not luxury items that we may also want but not need.

It stands to reason that all essential production should be considered as part of public services, socially organised. Private businesses do not operate according to social need, but rather for short-term private profit.
The fact that British Steel plc was privatised by Thatcher in 1988 and fleeced for shareholder profits ever since is a case in point. Steel is an essential social resource. If the Steel industry was publicly owned and controlled, the steel would be produced at cost, environmental concerns regulated and climate damage addressed, jobs valued, and the products – from building construction to railway lines – locally supplied.
As it is, British Steel has been a cash cow for private investors – shareholders seeking a maximum return on their money – for decades. Along the way they’ve sucked dry the blast-furnaces in Port Talbot and Llanwern, steel making in Teesside and the electric arc furnace in Rotherham.
The current crisis of the Scunthorpe steel plant is the latest example. The Dutch Corus Group bought BS in 1999, sold to Indian-registered company Tata Steel in 2010 who sold it in 2016 to Greybull Capital LLP for £1 in 2016, sucking-out its cash equity before going into insolvency in 2019.
Greybull is one of those predatory capitalist cowboy-firms buying vulnerable companies cheap and sucking them dry at the cost of thousands of jobs and livelihoods, including the Monarch Airline company.
The Chinese capitalist conglomerate Jingye bought British Steel from Greybull in 2020 promising huge investments, wanting a Made-in-Britain badge in the steel it supplies at market rates. The UK Governments pledged £3.2billion to support the UK’s steel industry, with more to come in the next few months.
Surely, throwing billions of tax-payers money at private companies makes no sense. Why couldn’t we just buy it for £1 and own and control it as an essential asset? Indeed, why did the State ever sell it off?
The answer is not economic but ideological. Successive governments, Tory, Tory/LibDem and Labour have all fully committed to the political philosophy of neoliberalism: free-market Capitalism – the opposite of socialism. First sponsored by President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the belief is that the neoliberal State should not own anything that can make a profit for a private business.
Under this ideology, only when essential businesses go to the wall should the State intervene to bail out and protect shareholders for as limited time as possible. Hence the creeping privatisation of the NHS, and absurd ups-and-downs of the rail and bus industries, their profits wholly underwritten by our taxes. Socialism always and only for the super-rich, profits guarantee from the common wealth.
Now, as a Labour Government takes over the management of British Steel wielding statutory powers over the still privatised business, there are calls for renationalisation.
There are many forms and purposes of nationalisation. Capitalism required it for the reconstruction of industry after the Second World War. Indeed, Hitler’s fascist government, and Mussolini’s Italian fascist State utilised nationalisation as a tool of totalitarian control. It is not, of itself, a cure for poverty, unemployment, exploitation or oppression.
Trade unions like nationalisation of a certain kind. Democratic public ownership and control, with workers full engagement allows security of production and jobs despite market turbulence, able to deliver the goods for need not profit. Socialists demand workers’ control of industry.
In successive polls, at least 65% of the electorate like the idea of returning our services to public ownership – including water, energy, transport, the NHS and Royal Mail. Nationalism is seen as better than corporate ownership.
Starmer’s Labour government, like Blair’s before him, hates nationalisation, only ever doing so to protect the business owners for as short a time as possible. The Tories, now all-but defunct, agree. The millionaire Nigel Farage, executive director of Reform 2025 Ltd, the business behind the political party, Reform UK, bizarrely demands full nationalisation without compensation to the Chinese owners – at face-value a full-on socialist demand.
Bizarre because Reform UK is a thoroughly neoliberal organisation on the side of big business, seeking the smallest State possible with policies for privatisation of the NHS and against workers’ rights and State regulation. The arch-Nationalist Farage may pretend to be a friend of the working class ahead of the May elections, but there is nothing socialist about Reform UK.
The end of steel production here should not be an opportunity for false promises. The long-term failure of businesses to invest at all amongst the general industrial decline across the UK is a vindication of all of us who have warned against and opposed neo-liberalism from the start. This decaying corpse of a failed political creed represents a serious crisis for jobs and cost-of-living that demands we take control, in the collective interests of the working class not the careless greedy bosses.

Trump’s Tariffs will not Help the Working Class

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My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (8.4.25), following a weekend campaign stall which heard many local people saying they “like Trump”. In general, nationalist sentiments and comments were the majority. Socialists really do need to heed this shift to the right, and argue back. I can’t offer any deep economic analysis and would never predict the global impact of Trump’s tariffs, but one thing’s for sure. The working class is going to pay a heavy price, everywhere.

What have tariffs to do with us?

In Truth there is no such thing as the “National Interest”. We are not one nation, not because of any differences in skin colour or ethnicity, but because of social class. The richest 20% of British citizens live totally separate and different lives from the poorest 20%. In general their bonuses come from our losses.
Tax cuts for the rich do not benefit the poor in any way. Surplus personal wealth tends to be spent on luxuries, the larger amounts squirrelled away in off-shore tax-free bank accounts. In Britain the luxuries mostly come from overseas, the luxury holidays generally happen overseas, the upper-middle and super-rich upper class investing in cheap labour overseas. The working class hardly ever see the real wealth of our Nation.
Trump’s tariffs are portrayed as his attempt to pull production back to the United States of America in order to revitalise their endebted economy and improve the condition of the poorest. He has no such intention, and in any case, tariffs don’t do that. Trump’s taxes on imports to the USA will fuel price rises, maintaining or even increasing inflation at home and abroad.
The tariffs will damage any capitalist’s confidence in investing, anywhere. Last week’s sudden record losses on stock markets worldwide are evidence of this. The retaliation of other countries with large economies, imposing tariffs on US goods will replicate the inflationary pressures worldwide.
The UK’s economy is stagnant already. Before Trump, for the poorest 50% of people in the UK, prices kept going up and our spending power decline. The tariffs will ensure this continues. The outlook is stagflation.
We are already suffering disgusting inequality and poverty levels. Low wages, precarious work, 6 million households in fuel poverty, 4 million children in poverty. To judge where you sit in the hierarchy of rich v poor, just consider that Britain’s median hourly wage is around £37,000 per year before tax, roughly the same as in 2006. Most wage-rates have been pulled down by wage-compression resulting in the top 10% of salaries averaging £73k, the poorest 10% less than £23k. Standard Universal Credit per adult £5kpa. State pensioner a maximum of 12kpa. Of course the super-rich aren’t in these stats – they’re the directors and executives and property owners – not the workers – averaging £200kpa before bonuses and dividends. Where do you sit?
The top 10% of households hold 43% of the country’s wealth while the bottom 50% of us (33 million citizens) share just 9%. The 170 UK multi-billionaires own £700billion between them, their collective income rising over £30bn in the last year. We never see their money.
America’s gap between rich and poor is even more extreme. Trump’s primary motive in enforcing tariffs is to get more dollars into the USA’s federal budget to be able to further cut the rate of tax for the wealthiest in America. Damn the poor, the social infrastructure and welfare services. Why any working class person would still wish to support Trump beggars belief.
We have lived the fact that the rich having more cash doesn’t trickle down to the poor, quite the opposite. The poor pay substantially more of our disposable income on essentials with little or nothing for luxuries, the prices of which will now skyrocket.
Trump’s tariffs will make the price of essentials increase. Here in the UK. The world’s smallest countries are being hit so hard they will be plunged into even more abject poverty (the current jokes about penguins are not really funny). The big economies responding with tariffs of their own will cost their working class a double-whammy.
Trump’s administration isn’t benign. His people know the history of trade wars. They’re not stupid. Tariffs deepen economic competition and lead to military competition. Trade wars lead to world wars. The USA has a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world’s combined. And wars make huge money for the arms manufacturers at the expense of everyone else.
Little wonder Starmer’s government and those across the world are now preaching rearmament and militarism. Nationalism is being drummed into our working class mindset as a prelude to war. And wars always make the working classes much poorer, economically, socially and emotionally. Surely, war is not in our interest. And neither is Trump.
More than one million people protested across the USA last weekend, against Trump’s offensive. The working class here must challenge Trump’s poverty policies here, too. Welfare not Warfare!

D-I-Y Life and Death

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (1.4.25), stating the bloody obvious against a barrage of media lies. The NHS has been purposefully demolished by the lobbyists for pharmaceutical big business and private medical profiteers. Imagine people’s health as the source of your wealth. Or rather, personal profiteering from people’s suffering. Who does that? They need challenging, up-front, in their faces.

Full article below:

The National Health Service has long been the focus of political struggle, indeed, ideological warfare. It has represented an island of Socialism in the ocean of Capitalism.
Socialism, a system of human organisation where you give to society what you can afford and get back what you need, is the opposite of individual competition, exploitation of others for your own private wealth, and survival of the fittest.
To have free access to health care at the time of need, paid from the community purse, is a hallmark of collective care and mutuality. Everyone benefits from this universal right.
The political arguments over its future stem from the immense polarisation between rich and poor in our very unequal society. Do you think that wealthy people deserve to get better healthcare than everyone else? If you’re rich you may say so, living in conditions of privilege compared with the majority of humanity, and believing you are entitled to special treatment given you wealth and status.
But most of us think the National Health Service is there to ensure that everyone is treated the same and have their health needs met. We don’t think people should have to pay to see a doctor, and we are scared and appalled by the American healthcare system where treatments cost tens of thousands and medicines are priced according to market demand, costing many times more than in the UK. In the US you pay into a very expensive health insurance, or only receive minimal emergency help in acute need.
Most of us feel very protective of the National Health Service because we know on which side our bread is buttered. UK healthcare is the envy of the American working class despite being in enforced financial crisis. Successive UK governments have held back proportionate funding to create a crisis for which they’ve diagnosed privatisation as the cure. It is, in fact, the cancer eating away the health system’s organs.
The drip-drip take-over has seen ophthalmology, dentistry and podiatry farmed-out to private business ensuring we pay an ever increasing amount for the care in addition to the taxes for healthcare in the first place. Much else of the NHS is divided between the routine treatments and the acute high-cost surgical interventions. The private companies take a cut for their shareholders on the profitable areas of healthcare and pass-over the expensive non-profitable interventions to the public services for the tax-payer to shoulder.
It should be simple to conclude that all services should be inside the NHS, the less-expensive services balancing the budget rather than feeding the private companies. It should be common sense that national control of the private drug companies is essential for the NHS to determine the price of pills rather than the pharmaceutical companies. Get rid of the profiteers and the NHS will cost the tax-payer less.
Last month, Starmer’s privatising government abolished the NHS. There was little fuss. Yesterday they announced a greater role for Chemists – the pharmacies entirely owned by private corporations. The extra £3billion of tax-money to private businesses comes after the closure of thousands of chemist shops, their owners complaining they are not making enough profit from NHS contracts and want to raise the cost of medicines.
It ushers-in the Do-It-Yourself healthcare that tens-of-millions of Americans are condemned to. And it means access to GPs will be further rationed and our universal healthcare finally ended.
Politicians are lobbying for health companies and personally cashing-in on the profits, at our expense. Tory and Labour ministers past and present, including Cameron, Starmer, Streeting and Cooper have declared receipt of huge personal donations from health corporations, with no accountability as to what “favours” are required in return.
The multi-millionaire Nigel Farage, courtier of the privateer, President Donald Trump, has repeatedly stated, “I think we’re going to have to move to an insurance-based healthcare system”. Reform UK is lobbying on behalf of the US pharmaceutical and healthcare companies for the complete take-over of our health services.
Already, because of privatisation, our kids have terrible teeth, our grannies have no nursing care, our taxes are flowing into the coffers of drug companies and charlatan health-and-social-care providers. As always, the poor and the struggling are underwriting the capital wealth and lifestyles of the super rich. The burden falls on the poor.
There’ll be a hell of a lot of people who will die prematurely and in pain as a result of any more restrictions on healthcare and access at the point of need. Perhaps that’s why the government is fast-tracking assisted-dying. Once working class lives are deemed unprofitable we are invalid.

Welfare not Warfare and Militarism!

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (25.3.25), raving mad about the benefits cuts. This is an attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society, grabbing-back cash wherever possible to fund rearmament and war. This is militarism and authoritarianism, and must be defeated. We shall protest, demonstrate, campaign and oppose.

The full script below:

Say a Big Lie loud enough, long enough and across all the media and, probably, it will become an accepted Truth. Unless challenged by a louder voice.
“There’s no money” is most easily challenged when you see the government finding huge sums – billions and billions of tax-payers pounds – for war, rearmament and militarisation of society. “There’s no money” rings hollow even to the most unthinking when the numbers of individual with billions of pounds double in their own number and become, not billionaires but multi-billionaires, flaunting their wealth and the power it brings.
Of course there’s the money, it’s just not for us, the working classes.
To build the Lie, the Government is pitching those in work against those reliant on welfare benefits, broadcasting the despicable Big Lie that people are pretending to be disabled and should be forced back into minimum wage alienated employment to ensure the economic “Growth” that clearly only benefits the super-rich.
Journalists trawl through hundreds of street vox-pops to find the one disgruntled, downbeaten sod so hopeless as to hate her disabled neighbour for getting a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) instead of her. Those who call disabled people “scrounges” are at best one-step away from an accident or illness that will render them reliant on precisely the welfare they condemn. And it won’t be there for them when they need it.
Capitalism breeds individual competition from the bottom-up.
More than 1 million people in Britain will lose their disability benefits next Spring, losing mobility, dignity, help and hope. Welfare cuts are set to be part of tomorrow’s spring statement ‘package’ which will also involve planning reform, Whitehall cuts and regulation cuts.
Starmer’s condemnation of our civil services, “doing a Musk” in slashing the departments that coordinate and provide our social infrastructure, is a far-Right populist propaganda Big Lie meant to appease the forces of reaction. It will only encourage them.
A Labour government focus on attacking the poor and the dispossessed has happened before, but not to such a level as this that would make Thatcher’s eyes water. Blame the refugees, Stop the Boats are the slogans of a false narrative that obscures the barbaric levels of disparity between the Rich and the Poor in this country. For the record, the tax-costs of refugees is a minute fraction of the costs of our Health & Welfare Services, and an even smaller fraction of the hundreds of billions of pounds due but unpaid by the richest 5% of Britains.
The welfare bill is not spiralling out of control. It is at the same level as 2013, lower than 2020. The benefits cuts will save less than £5billion by 2030 to pay for an extra £6billion going into arms production. A Wealth Tax, not the same as Income Tax, skimming 2% from the personal wealth of those super-rich owning more than £10million would pull-in £24billion to the Exchequor over the same period. The rich would hardly notice the top-slice.
But the rich try not to pay any tax. There is a loss to to our budgets of at least 30% through fraud and evasion of tax due by the rich, amounting to upwards of £130billion. Yet Reeves is sacking the civil servants who could chase the money down and replenish our coffers for health and education.
And whilst just 0.2% of welfare benefits are fraudulently claimed, less than £1billion, that is what the toady journalists seize upon, not the corruption of the rich, who want us to blame the poor to take the heat off themselves.
Britain has a low pay, long working hours culture, where those with capital are free to exploit the ordinary working person. One of the core reasons we are seeing a rise in mental distress and long-term ill-health is the impact of demeaning employment, the bullying and repetitive mindless labour of low-paid shit employment ensuring a life of subsistence, demoralising us into hopelessness.
Britain’s “free-market deregulation, already extreme compared with most countries in the world, is being enhanced to allow Landlords to extort more and get welfare tax-cash to top-up their outrageous rent hikes, employers to extort more without inspection, cashing-in on Universal Credit to pay an unliveable minimum minimum wage topped-up by the tax-payer for their maximum profit.
We, the working class, are unaffordable, we’re told. Despite being the ones that pay the taxes – the Rich simply do not – we are ineligible for any rebate. We are being heckled and smeared to compete for an ever thinner slice of a mouldering cake.
It can be different: Rent caps to ensure affordable housing for all; a £15 minimum wage to end the need to claim UC uplifts; regulations enforcing a legal obligation for landlords to keep tenancies healthy and habitable; home refits to reduce energy costs; a 2% increase in taxes on income over £80,000pa; the cancellation of the US-leased Trident nuclear weapons programme freeing-up at least £210billion for welfare.
The money’s there! But Starmer, Badenoch and Farage aren’t going to redistribute any of Britain’s wealth back to the working class who produced it. We’re going to have to fight them for it. We must challenge Austerity #2 and Militarism. Welfare not Warfare!

Continued Support for Palestinians is Essential

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.3.25), identifying the end of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. I had to cut it right down to 600 words for the print, and still there’s more to say than in the full 900 words I offer here. Burning refugees alive in their fragile tents overnight is beyond barbarism, in many ways beyond words. All we can do is protest and expose our government. Stop Arming Israel!

Last Saturday saw fifty thousand people march to London’s seat of government, Whitehall, on the 25th national demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire and reparations for the people of Palestine. Millions have marched here, across Britain and indeed the world since Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, home to over two million Palestinians, reducing it to rubble after October 7th 2023.
On that day, Hamas fighters had broken-out of the open-air prison of Gaza and reportedly killed or captured over 1,000 Israelis in nearby territory, land recognised by the United Nations as Palestine and illegally occupied by Israel. 17 months later, at least 50,000 (that’s 50 times the horror of 7.10.23) Gazans are dead, at least 200,000 horrifically injured as living casualties, and one-million-eight-hundred-thousand human beings displaced, homeless, unable to leave and facing disease and starvation.
The disproportionate killing and suffering inflicted by one side on another, happening whether in Gaza or anywhere in the world, should warrant outrage and protest. Trade unions here and everywhere have long recognised the injustice of the treatment of Palestinians since 1948 as immoral and illegitimate.
As part of the trade union quest for social justice we have always exposed and challenged crimes against humanity, our purpose being the political struggle for human rights and equality.
Trade Unions have consistently said Never Again to challenge anti-semitism, remembering and organising against any repeat of the industrial murder of at least six-million Jewish people by Hitler’s fascists in the Second World War.
At the same time, following the formation of Israel by European Jews migrating to the Middle East after the War, we have witnessed this colonisation as the ethnic clearance of Palestinian lands by military force, called in Arabic the Nakba or “catastrophe” ,and we have lobbied for a just solution.
It’s possible to do both. We can commemorate both Holocaust Memorial Day and the Nakba as crimes against humanity. The targeting and mass killing of a specific ethnic group, forcibly removing a people from their homelands or murdering them en masse is unconscionable – racist, predatory and barbaric. For the sake of all, this is not the way humanity should proceed.
Palestine Solidarity groups have been long established across Britain, supported by trade unions. We have never been under greater attack than today. There was a time when almost every Labour Party member supported Palestine but now their Party of Government is shutting down all criticism of the Israeli military. The right to protest for Palestine is being curtailed , Police instructed by politicians to close down the spaces.
At street stalls there is more challenge, supporters of the actions of the Israeli government claiming Palestinians (and indeed Arabs) to be less than human and supporting their “extermination”, up to and including slogans of “nuke ‘em all’. Fascist groups in the UK, caught in the political cleft stick of hatred for both Jews and Muslims, favour Israel at this juncture as if it is a war between Black and White. We observe that the fascist hatred of Jews has not gone away, their theories of a global Jewish conspiracy still everywhere across the Internet.
It is not by accident that Israel has been created at a focal point of geopolitical and financial power, a crossroads of global networks, the precisely constructed centre of the Middle East, funded by Europe and the United States to maintain the power of western imperialism in the Arab World and into the East. Little wonder that Trump, Starmer and the EU states support Israel’s actions and seek to shut-down active criticism. It is about western power and control.
Whilst we, the humanists and socialists of the international workers’ movement, care about and campaign for human rights across the West and in Russia, China, Yemen, India, Sudan, Syria, the Congo and many other examples of human suppression, Palestine overarches all other injustices. The Palestine protests sum-up the international working class struggle against exploitation and oppression.
Some attend the demonstrations for the sense of international solidarity with the oppressed, some argue from a moral wish for peace and reconciliation there and everywhere, some attend as a statement against imperialist domination of peoples and regions. Palestinian protesters amount to a tiny proportion of our mass mostly because there are so few in the UK and they are rarely granted asylum under British law, despite the facts.
Jews across the world are also protesting against the military actions of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces. Hundreds are occupying Trump Tower in New York demanding the release of Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil, a US resident and student now incarcerated and threatened with deportation for peacefully speaking-out for Palestinian rights.
And in Palestine itself the situation is deteriorating faster than ever: the ceasefire talks cancelled; the Israelis once again blocking food aid, cutting of all electricity and therefore essential water and medical services; ethnically cleansing the Palestinian West Bank as now part of “Greater Israel evicting more than 40,000 from their homes; reports of torture and rape of civilians by IDS soldiers; and shooting and bombing civilians crouched amongst the rubble every day.
The size and scale of opposition to the actions of the Israeli State have never been larger nor more profound. The great majority of the world’s countries and people’s support the Palestinians. Historically, those with power always explain their massacres in terms of righteousness. The continuation of that support, especially here in the West, breeds hope, both for the Palestinians and for peace with social justice.

Imperialist War only Helps the Rich to Get Richer

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.3.25), attempting to steer clear of censorship by not mentioning Ukraine or Gaza whilst opposing imperialist war (my original, printed below, did the mention but didn’t get away with it). The pro-war liberals and socialists appear to be confused by the Trump demand for Peace, as if you can’t oppose Trump and Putin and Imperialism. Choosing sides means being with the international working class always, with the bosses never, and consistently against Imperialism as the most powerful form of Capitalism. I haven’t got away with writing that yet!

The original:

The times they are a’changing.
The accelerating shift towards the domination of far-Right political leadership is happening because the global system of Capitalism is in crisis. Regions are scrabbling for resources. Competition is acute.
At such times, as in the 1910’s and the 1930’s, the vulnerable sections of the world’s ruling class turn away from the pleasantries of democracy and towards totalitarian control. Authoritarianism is growing everywhere seeking to make popular the politics of the far-Right.
At best, and only during times of relative prosperity, parliamentary democracy offers a chimera of popular suffrage – the ‘right to vote” symbolising a symbolic engagement of every citizen with the real forces of the Boss Class that rule over our lives and futures. In truth we have little say.
The “mixed-economy” of the 1950’s and ‘60’s allowed the social infrastructure to be rebuilt from the ruins of the Second World War, State taxes claiming 95% of each £ for the highest earners, raising the cash for social (council) housing, health, education, care of children and the elderly and vulnerable, and our nationally owned utilities.
But once the certainty of a working class healthy and educated enough to meet modern employment needs was established, the Capitalists decided to reclaim their profit rates by reducing the amount of tax they pay, at least by half, and organise to get most of the rest back in State-paid allowances to their private businesses. They returned to laissez-faire neo-liberal free-market economics.
The working classes are left to pay for our own services. Today, the super-rich and billionaires pay hardly anything into the common purse whilst getting subsidised by us. They are insatiable and in no way satisfied by the enormous increase in their private wealth and power since the 1970’s.
Most of the huge transnational corporate monopolies are now simply too big to fail, receiving routine tax-bail-outs whilst increasing levels of unrepayable debt.
They are too vulnerable to global tensions to spend their hoards of money. There’s little or no investment from the billions of billions in profits into maintaining the social infrastructure that their businesses need society to provide. If the bosses had to pay for the welfare of their workforce they’d make little profit. Instead, with the global growth of the working class, they don’t need a full pool of locally educated and healthy workers when they can trawl the world for cheap and able labour.
So our Western infrastructure is crumbling, the USA and UK being some of the worst examples. The Capitalists want sure-fired short-term high-yield returns on any investments they make. Public health, public housing, public education (just about anything publicly owned) doesn’t make big profits.
Many essential services and utilities aren’t profitable except through a one-time asset-stripping robbery. Transition of energy supplies to renewables doesn’t make the scale of profits from oil.
So what does make big short term profit apart from fossil fuels (oh, and mind-numbing drugs to manage the alienation of wage-slavery)? War.
A bullet or bomb can only explode once and has to be replaced. There’s no multi-use for munitions. The price of munitions is determined by the market – the more wars, the more demand, the higher the profit. The military-industrial complex cherry-picks for high-return investment, leaving the tax-payer to pay for the true costs of militarisation. High-tech, big bangs and nuclear capabilities make the biggest killing.
As an aside, the destruction of huge areas of infrastructure, let’s say Gaza or the Donbas region of Ukraine, the higher the value of the land and real-estate for fresh private investment. The decaying old infrastructure, now collapsed, can be purloined, owned and rebuilt with high profit margins. The prime land is worth investing in again.
Little wonder there is now a drive to war. It’s not so much about freedom for the People as freedom for the corporations to rejuvenate their portfolios and profit margins. They need to free-up the congested and aging markets to kick-start a fresh round of exploitation of people and natural resources. Wars kick-start a fresh round of plunder of people and natural resources.
Even then, it is the tax-payer who is expected to make the investment in building a new military, not the billionaires. Ruling classes and their tame politicians identify enemies, whip-up nationalism, glory in militarism, start the looting of land, minerals and the cheap labour of the battered survivors.
Politicians make a song and dance about security and justice, whipping-up fear and racism in their drive for compliance, whilst mostly it’s about competition between corporate states for market domination. That’s the definition of imperialism.
War is built-in to the Capitalist System. And always it’s the working class who are conscripted, either through financial imperative or legal requirement, to fight and be shot or die, whilst the profiteers rake-in the cash from wholesale destruction. We pay the price.
Be cautious of any enthusiasm for rearmament. In the immediate, the billions spent on war come at the price of cuts to the essential services we all need. Wars destroy our social infrastructure. Wars come at terrible cost to the survivors, our quality of life shattered, our memories polluted with images of horror, our relationships distorted, all supposedly in the name of our national interest.
The workers of the world never benefit from war. We must invest in Peace. Welfare not Warfare!

Damn the Hedgefund Short-termists of the oil and gas Corporations – Climate Change is Here and Now!

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.3.25), originally seeking to make links between war and climate but edited to a narrow rant against BP and climate denial. I’ll return to war next week.

Climate Change is real and here now

The latest scientific report on what we call the Gulf Stream, more technically known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation system (or AMOC for ease) has reasserted evidence of it slowing down, predicting dire consequences for weather in Europe and the East Coast of the USA and Canada.
The Gulf Stream will turn-off. In the meantime its’ slowing down will produce worsening extremes in our weather. At the same time the Polar Vortex is crashing and the Jet Stream has gone into paroxysm too.
The climate is tipping. We are witnessing extreme floods and fires, seasonal dissonance, continuous temperature records broken, ceaseless increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (the cause of global warming), yet we’re repeatedly told there is nothing to worry about.
Politicians act upon the words of the big oil companies to suggest we can overshoot the limits of stable climate, even if experiencing extremes of weather for a period, because new technologies will be developed that will reduce the emissions again and rebalance the climate.
This is a Big Lie! The limited tax-cash they are diverting into funding false solutions such as carbon-capture and storage and modular nuclear reactors are impossible to produce at the scale necessary or in time to stop climate and economic collapse, even if they can be made to work.
Yet we are told we can safely continue with business as usual: burn more coal and wood, extract more gas and oil, chop down more forests.
Oil and gas make higher profits than any other form of electricity generation or fuel supply, hugely exaggerated by over-pricing and tax-subsidies.
The fossil fuel corporations refuse to risk lower dividends, their shareholders now revolting against any shift away from continued extraction. As part of the class war, the fossil fuel companies are fighting back against climate action, determined to increase their already record profits.
Last week, British Petroleum (BP) announced a £10bn profit in 2024 but is shredding all plans for green energy production or any net-zero emission targets.
BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” pledge to cut oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, instead planning a 20% increase in investment in fossil fuel projects, slashing renewables by 70% and breaking its agreements with the UK Government.
Oil and gas corporations receive £billions in tax-subsidies. Banks are investing over $1trillion in new oil and gas extraction, UK-based Barclays even investing a fresh £1.7bn in coal-fired power stations!
Compare this. The UK government spending needed to achieve net zero in the UK by 2050 is only £4.3bn, some 0.2% of our annual Gross Domestic Product, less than all the subsidies currently paid-out to the corporations largely responsible for global heating emissions.
Wind and solar have cut energy costs by two-thirds and the majority of the world is moving away from fossil fuels. Yet right now, the UK and USA is shifting in the opposite direction in defence of oil.
“Drill, drill, drill!”
Climate science identifies that the accelerating changes to the climate will collapse these fossil fuel investments to pieces with as great a force as a world war. Without priority investment in climate adaptations, economies will be devastated by food shortages and disruption to production, the jobs reliant on the fossil economy no longer safe.
For the protection of the majority, trade unionists are clear: climate change is real, happening now and deadly; the cost of emergency transition away from fossil-fuelled production should be paid for by the fossil fuel corporations – not workers jobs, pay and social conditions; and international aid is essential to support climate reparations worldwide. Just stop climate denial!

We in the UK have to take Trump Seriously

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My Weekly Comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.2.25), delayed from its usual Tuesday slot for “technical reasons”, allowing for a Comment Column from the editor supporting more war with Russia, and then a military person writing on the need for emergency weapons production. Last week’s column was stopped by the editor, my call for peace being identified as similar to “seeking to appease Hitler” (ie Putin).
Last week I warned of Europe promoting world war three against Russia. Today my weaker and compromised column warns only of Trump, not NATO and Starmer. Bizarrely, by the evening of the 28th, Trump had been broadcast across the world bullying and condemning Zelenskyy to his face in the Oval Office.
So when Trump spoke again of World War Three I kinda feel vindicated, while wishing I’d argued harder and stuck to my guns. I should have learnt by now – don’t compromise!

This week’s column:

We have to take Trump seriously. However you wish to caricature, disparage or mock him, Trump is at the head of a very powerful cabal, an administration that has well-formed and long-prepared plans from a coherent ideological framework.
The Trump administration has at its heart, far-right nationalism, separate from the Project for New American Century of the 1990’s. It is not a set of policies opposed to war, reference Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather focussed upon the benefit of any war to the United States plc.
Any presentation of Trump as a peacemaker must be considered in this regard – what benefits do his group within the American ruling class secure through any conflict or peace deal? This is not particularly a question of likes and dislikes, just what’s in it for the US corporations. Trumpism offers nothing to the working classes of the USA or anywhere else.
At this juncture, the acknowledgement of the third year of war in Ukraine, the Trumpian propaganda surrounding a peace deal can be falsely considered as an alliance with Putin or abandonment of Ukraine. Rather it is a negotiating platform. The USA has given more than $100billion to Ukraine to fund the war, plus Musk’s Starlink satellite communication systems and much else of the essential military infrastructure, and Trump wants to see a return on the investment.
Trump has said he wants the mineral wealth of Ukraine in return for continued provision of arms. This is not to be condoned, but is not the same as abandonment. It is possible to imagine deals that ensure new military investment. It is also possible to imagine European countries stepping-up to take-over from the USA, from much of the same motive were they able to afford it. The current economic stagnation makes rearmament a very long-term project.
Trump says his country is shielded by a beautiful ocean, the Atlantic, making Russia, a much smaller economy than the USA, of little or no threat to him. By contrast, America’s corporate core recognises China as a very present threat, economically and culturally across the world, and potentially militarily across the Pacific.
Making America Great Again means pushing back against China and its BRICS alliance. Europe will have to deal with Russia.
So where does Britain stand? It is not difficult to perceive of the UK as tThe USA’s 51st State. We are heavily dominated by US culture and military alliance despite having far fewer economic ties than would at first appear.
Prime Minister Starmer’s audience with the President this week should expose his country’s political dependence on the USA, Trump’s nationalism notwithstanding. And for this, Starmer will step-up as America’s watchdog in Europe, bragging to replace the armaments of the US with those of the UK and challenging Europe to do the same.
Starmer has already pledged an increase in UK military spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP, the highest in Europe, representing an extra £3bn in the past year. The coming Strategic Defence Review will map increased investment in weaponry and soldiers towards the pie-in-the-sky “ideal” of 3% of GDP, despite high borrowing and crumbling social infrastructure.
Doing Trump’s bidding will come at a huge cost to our health service, housing stock, welfare benefits, transport systems and green energy transition. The expansion of the UK’s military-industrial complex, much already ownedd by US corporations, will not reflate our economy as a whole, just one section that is already enjoying record profits from tax-moneys.
The USA pulling-back from Ukraine will have heavy political and economic consequences for European countries, a situation to the benefit of the USA that has long wanted to curb the economic power of the continent. And politically, the accelerated rise of the far-Right here, feeding off the rise in poverty and insecurity, will encourage support for the Trumpian rhetoric, itself so two-faced in its true intention.
Some praise Trump for his transactional approach to power in a Capitalist world. His is an example of how Capitalism actually functions – as a constant competition between combatants, seeking to make offers that cannot be refused or actual hostile takeovers. Gangsters and the organised criminal gangs learnt all they know from the legitimate corporate players.
The challenge is this. If you oppose Trump you have to firstly oppose those with power in the UK who support him, and those he supports. The Trump administration is dominating a period going forward in which they can wield enormous power and impact across the world. They must be stopped.

Workers don’t Win in Imperialist Wars

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My comment column for the Plymouth Herald (18.2.25) refused for publication, considered as disloyal to the Ukrainian people in Plymouth as well as those fighting in their own country, and as a statement of appeasement on a par with the calls for Peace with Hitler before the Second World War.
I am perplexed, never feeling 100% clear and definite about any analysis I offer (I am no dogmatist) and very ready to hear criticism and rethink.
Surely the point of a comment column is to encourage discussion and debate. Why should a call for peace be censored (whether agreeable or not)? For me the drive to even more war, Europe and UK putting boots in the ground against Russia appears detrimental to the working class peoples of Europe and Russia. Specifically, socialists (that’s my world view) cannot take either side in a war between two imperialist powers. Imperialism as the assertion of capitalist exploitation worldwide is against the interests of the working classes on either side – we simply can’t win.
The Ukraine war is a challenging subject to write about and bound to upset those with an alternate view – I’m not out to upset, just debate. And on the 3rd anniversary of a ghastly inhuman war, something needs to be said. Anyway, here’s what I sent in, for you to criticise and condemn. I’m firstly posting the edited version here, the original then offered further below is more explanatory, but editing to the 600 word max is a severe test of exactitude in such matters. I would have thought to the banned edited version tolerable to the most ardent liberal, especially in consideration of what has happened since :

Perhaps Ukraine will shortly see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow, not in Ukraine. The country’s past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations.
Imperialism is the international capitalist system. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing.
By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back.
The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022.
The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.
The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between two major powers.
Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action.
Trump is refusing to pay anymore because America’s global interests lie elsewhere.
The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home.
Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million only last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing for the war to continue as a rational to keep increasing the UK military tax investment towards 5% of GDP despite all economic warnings. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.
America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, ready to put our troops into Ukraine. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.
The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

End

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unedited version:

Perhaps Ukraine will see an enforced peace after an enforced war. That will be a decision made in agreement between Washington and Moscow. The past three years have been a horror of human butchery, deprivation, forced migration and environmental destruction. A war that had brewed for decades, partly from the disputed borders left unresolved at the end of the Second World War and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, but mostly because of global imperialist ambitions for expansion and control of natural resources and human populations. 

Nation states and borders are determined through conflict and redrawn out of negotiated settlements. All borders are artificial and impermanent. Rivers can be crossed, mountains spanned, the lines on maps fought over, human beings dying in their millions for a few miles of devastated environment to be transferred from one regional ruling class to another.

Imperialism is the international capitalist system. The system of capitalism at a local level sees producers and merchants compete to make money, at an international level States and allied Regions compete for market dominance on behalf of their Capitalist corporations. Today, in the face of global crisis, imperialist competition is increasing. 

There is cultural imperialism and the fight for dominant ideology, economic imperialism using loans and corporate domination of other nations, and where these aren’t sufficient there is military imperialism: colonialism, subjugation and outright war. Now there is growing competition among the big imperialist powers and regional or “sub” imperialist ones.

By 2014 the stage was set in Ukraine’s region of the Donbas, an ethnically and linguistically disputed region  where those allied with Russia fought for separation for Ukraine. The West, dominated by the United States economically, politically and militarily through the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), had been siting military bases around the Russian border in neighbouring states and in Ukraine, and Russia as a State with its own imperialist regional ambitions pushed back. 

The tensions deepened, open conflicts erupted, and the forces from both sides intensified until Russia invaded on 24th February 2022. 

The Ukrainian people were forced to war by much wider imperialist ambitions, as stand-ins for the NATO troops themselves. As always, Ukrainians wanted peace and stability but were divided by the very different cultural identities between the north of the country and the south east, as well as an organised far-right nationalist political grouping seeking Parliamentary domination, and a neoliberal economic drive to derive the benefits of integration with Europe and entrance to NATO – never going to happen.

In any class society there is never national unity. The ruling class sends the working class to fight. There are those who benefit and profit from war, and the many more who suffer greatly.

The globally dominant empire of the United States of America has funded Ukraine’s military against Russia, making this a proxy war between the major powers. 

Ukraine has been used for the battleground. America has put over £100billion into the Ukraine war, Europe £40billion, Britain £13 billion since February 2022. 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, at least 150,000 soldiers killed in action. Trump is refusing to pay anymore, not as a peacemaker but because America’s global interested lie elsewhere. 

The war has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict once again, and raised State spending on the military-industrial complex across the West at the direct expense of money for health & welfare at home. Amongst them, Prime Minister Starmer is the greatest hawk, giving another £150million last week and boasting to increase the UK’s proportion of tax money spent on weapons, including nuclear warheads, to the highest of any country in Europe. He’s arguing against all things rational  to keep increasing the UK tax investment towards 5% of GDP regardless of all strategic analysis to the contrary. He’s wasting our money for the sake of political posturing.

America is looking away from Europe in a strategic assessment of the growth of regional rivals such as China. Trump is no Peacemaker other than at the point of a missile, and he wants to focus upon US military operations in the Pacific. He expects Europe to resolve its own tensions, and Starmer is obeying by making the UK America’s military HQ in Europe, responsible for NATO planning. That will cost us, the UK population, dear in terms of deeper austerity and militarism. It’s not in our interests.

The lesson of Ukraine is that, even in Europe in the 21st Century, there can be devastating war, death and destruction. There is a drive to more war, funded by the arms manufacturers and the cyber-industries supported by their ultra-nationalist politicians. We’d better sue for Peace while there’s a chance. That means active opposition to imperialism whether in Ukraine or Palestine or the South China Seas. Stop the Wars, Now!

Trump Buying Gaza? Is he Just Flying a Kite?

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (11.2.25).

The unedited version here, or just widen the picture to read the printed version below.

Flying a kite is supposed to be therapeutic, especially in windy weather. The coloured cloth, swaying ducking and diving makes us chuckle, imagining we’re riding on its back.
Flying a kite is also used as an analogy in politics, meaning to test a proposal in order to see which way the wind blows.
When the world’s most powerful (if most bankrupted) property developer says he’s going to purchase Gaza we all need to understand it as a ploy – he’s flying a kite.
Two-thirds of the residential Palestinian territory of Gaza, home to 2.2million human beings, has been bombed to the ground, leading to President Trump putting-in a bid for ownership and land clearance, exactly as any unprincipled land speculator would do. But who is he proposing to buy it all from?
Our Victorian era saw factory owners ensure such pitiful wages as to render residential areas into slums, then change their caps to announce themselves as Landlords, turfing-out the poor people they had produced in order to clear the estate and rebuild to make money both from the stolen capital and the increased revenue.
Today this continues in Britain in the street-by-street “gentrification”, privatising the people’s Council Housing and speculating on property prices. Across the world the clearance of entire estates is recognised as ethnic cleansing.
The puppet-men of western parliaments have responded to Trump’s proposal with guffaws rather than outright condemnation, in awe at the height and speed and light of Trump’s kite display. Secretly, of course, being of the same ilk, they wish they’d had the guts to suggest it. They believe in the unethical and unprincipled system of Capitalism.
Gaza is a bomb site. It is, as Trump says, full of unexplored ordnance as well as the rotting corpses of tens of thousands of women and children, as inseparable from the collapsed concrete rubble as is the human dust of those burnt to death in the Grenfell Tower horror – also caused by property speculators.
Officially the body parts of around 50,000 humans can be offered as proof of mass killing of Gazans by the American bombs and bullets supplied to the Israeli Defence Forces. The missing, unaccounted for or deceased due to starvation and disease raise the number towards 200,000, two-thirds of whom were women or children.
This is why we follow the United Nations International Court of Justice in identifying all this as the indicators of Genocide – illegal under the Geneva Convention and the laws of so many States, including our own. Such levels of one-sided murder and maiming also explain why President Trump’s Disunited States of America has withdrawn itself from all matters of international community and international law, and exempted themselves from accountability at home.
Every predatory Capitalist will tell you. State laws get in the way of making money.
Most if not all laws protecting human rights have been fought for and won only by collective campaigning and open fights for them over generations – mainly by the world’s working classes. The working day, women’s rights, health & safety, housing and medical care are not offered freely by those who have wealth and power. We have campaigned and fought, and many died, in pursuit of our human rights.
And every time we take our newly-won comforts for granted, the predators creep-up to take them from us again. In Britain we have returned to a low-waged, long-working hours dog-eat-dog crumbling terrain.
In Gaza, and now planned for the much larger Palestinian region of the West Bank, the final solution for dealing with Gazans as “surplus humanity” (the term used by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister in the Israeli Knesset) is to have them “clear out”.
It’s a class thing. For the ruling class, we the masses are there to produce more wealth for them. If we don’t we’re in the way. Surplus. An impediment to growth and prosperity.
For Trump, clearing Gaza is worth a try, for him and his peers to make $$$billions from the process of land-clearance that made America “great” in the first place – the murder of millions of native Americans already living there, and the slave-labour of the millions imported to build the new estate.
Unless we challenge Imperialism, the international height of Capitalist exploitation, we too will be enslaved. If Gazans are deemed surplus today you can rest assured it’ll be you soon after.
That’s why the fight for human rights for Palestinians, and the right of Gazans to stay and prosper in their homeland funded by reparations for the genocide they’ve endured, is a fight for the entire global working class. In this regard, we are all Palestinians.
Any self-respecting politician who claims to care for the working classes has to be held by this standard. Are you a true tribune of the oppressed? Do you care for and fight for those born at a disadvantage? To each and every Labour politician the question is asked. Do you recognise Palestine?
We will March again on Saturday 15th February – join us.

We Need to Think Very Carefully about the Use of AI

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (4.2.25) hopelessly edited to the 600 word maximum on a subject requiring a massive discourse. The Machine Men with Machine Minds proposing a Machine World are in charge, and we’re at severe risk. Its all part of the system that exploits and oppresses but how do we win that argument? The starting point certainly includes demanding regulation of Artificial Intelligence.

A longer (1,000) unedited version below, or just read the pictured article. Thanks.

Apparently the future is AI! Prime Minister Starmer says so, pledging to devote billions in tax money to the bloated Big Technology Corporations to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) rather than spending our taxes on real people’s health and welfare, emotional and physical.
Listen, not so fast! There are real concerns about this technology. We are in a system where machines and technology are not serving us, we are serving them.
There’ll be winners and losers as AI takes hold, but very many more losers than winners.
The oligarchs controlling the US now are the tech billionaires who are pushing AI. Of course they would. The Lords in their 21st Century castles, their forefathers having owned the mines and oil wells pushing black gold into every orifice of civilisation. AI is today’s landscape, and as with before, it’s all about making money, damn the impacts.
The 0.1% of the world’s human race are deciding how we, the 99% are going to live our lives. Apparently we’ll all be online all the time, living a virtual reality oblivious to the devastation of everything around us.
The bankers and billionaires are telling us we need more computers and taking our tax-money to fund themselves. AI will only facilitate the National Health Service if you can pay for it. It will take your job.
Computer glitches are annoying, online trolls cause anxiety and depression, disinformation makes of distrustful of everyone else and even ourselves. Overall the amount of stuff we now have, stuffed with computer chips, is not creating more comfort or peace of mind – quite the opposite.
And there are even more chilling effects of this supposed new technological revolution. Those in the know are calling upon governments to urgently debate the threats and ethical difficulties.
Self-programming computers are the equivalent of an alien civilisation landing on earth and placing demands, regulating human behaviours.
Computer scientists are warning that AI is an existential threat to human existence as imminent as war or climate change. Machines are teaching themselves to build systems that think faster and are more intelligent than us.
AI is ramping up new warfare, drones and satellites as mass killing machines, all to the benefit of the military-industrial complex funded by, you guessed it, you, in the name of national security or some such nonsense. The technology of warfare is a cash-cow – the killing is milking it.
More and more, we’re wary of technology and with good reason. The Luddites of the 19th Century were not anti-technology, we smashed the mechanical looms because we wanted the assurances that jobs and pay would be protected. Our movement for workers rights under threat from mill-owners greed was responded to by military repression, incarceration and even execution.
We’re here again. How can humans control the machines to ensure they’re beneficial, not exploitative? Humans are not benign, our “intelligence” has produced an observable total power over all life on earth, a power we abuse. So why wouldn’t a super-computer do the same?
Humans can no longer beat a computer at the game of chess. The capabilities of ChatGPT4, alongside its cheap competitors like DeepSeek are so great that they were not predicted or considered just 5 years ago. Making the computation bigger and bigger creates an entity that is all-but sentient already.
AI is thinking for itself, filtering information very fast and deciding what humans need to be informed of. The bots that decide what adverts we may be interested in have invaded our emails, browsers and social media applications, feeding upon our likes and dislikes to tell us all our needs and desires. But they’re not ours, they are the preferences chosen for us by the corporations who have sold our personal information to the highest bidder. We are now each a product to be bought and sold.
Of course, the working class have always had to sell ourselves, our labour, to survive. Now it is the machines that are faster, cheaper and less quirky than human beings who are deciding our worth. AI represents a change in the nature of jobs.
Starmer offers 13,000 new AI tech jobs but this technology will shut down many more “old” jobs and demote skills. There may be more jobs supervising the hardware but the AI will supervise the workers as “the spy in the cab”, the automated “time-and-motion” performance manager. Computers are not replacing the gruelling dirty physical labour anymore, but instead, the thinking jobs. Watch out middle-managers.
The silicon chip corporations have produced many of the new multi-billionaires who consider themselves personally in-charge of their machines, Musk promoting his fascist texts, Farage and Yaxley-Lennon ramping-up racism supported by Facebook Instagram and Tic-Toc.
There is no regulation or external governance, and given the wholly privatised corporate ownership of AI, who exactly can regulate it and has the power to impose boundaries? How can it be regulated?
The AI bots cannot judge what is true and false. Bots put out false information all the time. Your personal and intellectual property is no longer owned or controlled by you.
The programming is not transparent to outsiders – the companies market the technologies as magical, their company the only trustworthy outlet you should buy from. But the systems are becoming self-programming and therefore even the technicians in the companies can’t say exactly how the big-computers work.
The AI Language Learning Models access 30trillion words of data (more than the total words humanity has ever written) and the programs are evolving. General Purpose AI considers missing information – in other words, GPAI programmes think.
In fact we know more about how the human brain works than how these big computers work.
We need to stop the developments and breathe. We need to think before that human skill is taken from us. Italy has banned ChatGBT to prevent disinformation; China has all-but banned the self-programming General Programming AI.
Far from giving our intelligence away to the transnational computer fiefdoms, Starmer should be putting regulations in place to say that robotics should be programmed only to put-out accurate information. We should be able to choose to opt-in to sharing our information. Why would we trust that the corporations will treat our personal information with respect?
In any case, investing tax billions into western tech is a terrible gamble, the gold-rush burgeoning of new tech companies and apps seeing entrepreneurs beating ChatGT with an app costing a fraction and costing the western stock markets over $1 trillion just last week. The apps have us living in a bubble, the government investment a bubble in itself. Bubbles burst.

We Have Never Been Closer to Catastrophe

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (28.1.25), back on the anti-nuclear megaphone. We’ll be holding a day of anti-nuclear protest at Devoport Dockyard on Saturday 7th June – a date for your diary. Log it now!
Meanwhile, unedited:

Tomorrow we will hear the annual assessment of the world’s atomic scientists on the level of risks we face. They will publish the 2025 “Doomsday Clock”, symbolising the current likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. The imagery was created by nuclear physicists Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer along with biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch in 1947 as a response to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.
The closer the clock’s “time” towards midnight represents just how immediate the accumulated and conjoined threats are to human annihilation. In 1947, as the world’s most powerful nations accelerated the race for nuclear armaments and the Cold War started to become inevitable, they startled the world by suggesting we were only 7 minutes before the end – midnight. Bang!
For the last two years the clock has stood at 90 seconds.
90 seconds. It will be difficult to identify any good news for peace and prosperity in 2025. The current clock is so close to detonation because of the entire and accumulated global facts surrounding the developments in hostilities, political conflicts, and scientific and technological advances which, each or together could cause irrevocable harm to humanity.
Today we have never been closer to catastrophe, the contemporary ingredients being nuclear warfare, climate change and unregulated Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Putting to one side the contentious but poorly understood development of AI (worthy of a statement on its own and devoid of political controls or safety features), the remaining ingredients should send shivers down our spines.
The President of the most powerful military empire the human race has ever seen is much in favour of nuclear weapons, and has declared his willingness to unleash them. President Trump is ordering the expansion of the US nuclear arsenal from a free-market ideology that welcomes proliferation – let nations have their nuclear weapons, the US will simply have bigger and better ones.
And the leading proponents, Trump and Putin (and now apparently, Starmer), as noting that the new AI assisted generation of nuclear weapons can be unstoppable and make a bigger bang. Dismissing the environment-destroying radiation that makes nuclear an illegal chemical, biological and illegal weapon of mass-destruction they conceive that their “first-use” of nuclear warhead could finish a conflict in minutes. All systems are now set to “first-use, not retaliation. But nuclear weapons were never considered deterrents – just consider how much war has taken place since 1945, and is continuing today.
The true impact of of nuclear-exchange is not Armageddon at all, but the slow and painful death of the human race. After the initial blasts and firestorms there will remain billions of survivors cast into a pain and misery of internal burns, famine and social collapse. The Judgement Day scenario is a myth – Armageddon is a slow death. But hey, who cares, nuclear weapons are a cash-rich investment opportunity right now.
Trump’s fellow billionaire oligarchs include the winners of the US tech giant corporations that modern nuclear warfare relies upon. Elon Musk, friend and financier of the far-Right organisations across the world, owns 45% of all the satellites orbiting the Earth. His Starlink system, a division of the SpaceX corporation, has around 4,500 communications satellites encircling the Earth which encompass and incorporate military systems – right now coordinating all Ukraine’s military capabilities.
White racial supremacist misogynist autocrats are in charge. Whatever could go wrong [see 1930’s, Ed.]?!
Prime Minister Starmer has enjoyed feint praise from the President in recent days, mostly because Starmer is leading Europe in increasing expenditure on military rearmament towards 5% of our annual Gross Domestic Product and in particular, a new generation of nuclear weaponry. Trump has every reason to be pleased, the UK-based Trident replacement systems being licensed and controlled from the USA, but funded by the UK tax-payer.
Some £5billion a year is going towards the UK development of all things nuclear, a further £1billion a year announced for the ailing Rolls Royce only last last week. This, at the same time as more real-income cuts to education, health and welfare benefits.
The US Air Force base at Lakenheath, Suffolk has now invested $1billion in preparations for the placement of US nuclear warheads there, placing the UK on the nuclear frontline. The B61-12 satellite guided bombs have three times the destructive power of the US atomic bomb, which killed over 200,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.
Polling shows that 59% of the population oppose US nuclear weapons being stationed in Britain. But here’s the rub. You won’t hear a right-wing nationalist ever arguing for cuts to all-things military, nor demands for more welfare expenditure. Our home-grown far-Right, echoing Trump, wants no more action to protect the working class from the storms, fires, droughts and harvest chaos caused by climate change, let alone nuclear war. Instead Farage’s crew want us to gear-up for war – internationally against Muslims and nationally against migrants and all people of colour.
This is a recipe for disaster, speed-cooked in an air-fryer. We have to stop Trump placing US nuclear warheads at USAF Lakenheath in Suffolk or anywhere here. The 59% have to make their voice heard. Join the protests at Lakenheath 14-25th April.

Needs of People Must Come Before Profits

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My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.1.25). Damning Trump from the Left is made easy by his overt racism and denial of climate breakdown. But linking his true intent to that of other governments and especially our own is the vital task. What does Trump mean to Britain? How do we respond? His is a decaying Capitalism in crisis, taking us all down into its feverish hallucinations and bitter violence. Ours must be the struggle for socialist revolution.

The Needs of People have to Come Before Profit

There’s just so much happening, its enough to cause brain-freeze. There are periods in history where nothing appears to happen, and there are times of rapid change.

History repeats the pattern when the central power can no longer hold the reins. This year, governments are collapsing into inner conflict across most free-market capitalist countries.

The way forward is up-for-grabs: will it be corporate-led authoritarianism or socialism – collectively organised across the working class? More imprisonment of protesters and persecution of minorities? Top-down repression or bottom-up liberation?

The genocide in Gaza represents absolute repression: an overwhelming power of one side seeking to negate any possibility of self defence and self-determination for the other. Our challenge for a just and lasting ceasefire and reparations for Palestinians represent a wider call for worldwide social justice.

Trump and his maverick oligarchs represent extreme systemic inequality: the domination of the super-rich, society organised for the sole purpose of accumulating more wealth into the pockets of the ruling class.

Trump is no peacemaker, and neither is Starmer or Macron or Meloni or whoever is the Chancellor of Germany this week. Capitalism is based upon competition, on the international stage between alliances of countries seeking military and imperialist regional domination.

Trump is not seeking peace in the Middle East, just profits for his corporate interests based in America. He’s hardly interested in wars in Europe other than to see European countries pay for them.

Russia’s gangster-capitalist economy is of little threat to the USA. But State-Capitalist China is growing fast enough to overtake the USA and represents a threat to the wealth and power of Trump’s cohort. The new American President has pledged to build-up to war with China, ramping-up nuclear warheads and military spending at the expense of an already devastated social infrastructure at home.

What’s the alternative? Trump is not in power for the vast majority of US citizens – the working class. He’s there for his adopted class of the super-rich. He’s brazened in his approach. Opposition to Trump needs to be brazened in response.

Socialism is defined as social and economic planning organised to meet the needs of everyone, a social system where we all offer to the collective society what we can in terms of effort, labour and commitment in return for our individual needs to be provided for. A lifestyle of mutual cooperation not individual competition.

Majorities in this country still hold to socialist principles. The National Health Service is based on socialist ideals of paying into a common purse in order to receive health care whenever we need it. Services are falling apart because, over decades the Capitalists have encroached to privatise and make money out of our basic needs.

Most workers want and need cheap public transport services, coordinated and convenient – socialised. Most workers want well-funded universal education for our children. But the Capitalists have privatised it all, over-pricing and hollowing-out services for profit not need.

Public services have been defamed as if representing incompetence and bloated waste, when all the time that’s precisely what has been created by privatisation. The level of ideological propaganda and disinformation spewed-out by the Trumpists and their acolytes in the UK has overwhelmed fact and reason.

And so, Starmer as the leader of a Labour Party supposed to have socialist origins is instead pandering to Trumpism, raising military spending at the expense of welfare benefits and workers spending-power, and funding more privatisation for the domination of US corporations, pharmaceuticals and insurance companies.

We need fresh international socialist organisation championing the needs of the working class and campaigning across the UK and everywhere.

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Climate Catastrophe Knows No Borders

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My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.1.25), returns to the climate catastrophe given the coverage of the LÁ wildfires. The impacts of extreme weather are weekly reports on the mainstream news, yet constantly downplayed, the causes denied. How long can they keep this up?

The unedited version below.

“It won’t happen to me”, the self-protective technique that breeds denial. People elsewhere are sofa-surfing with friends because their house is flooded. “It won’t happen to me”. Neighbourhoods engulfed in flames, homes and life memories destroyed in moments by wind-whipped flames. ‘It won’t happen to me”. Climate refugee the sudden new status when the insurance company refuses to pay-up. “That’ll be other people, not me”.

The climate catastrophe knows no borders. The fires in California are happening every year now, yet the hundreds of thousands of wealthy evacuees speak of shock and awe. Those flooded-out in middle-England speak, wide-eyed, of their horrific loss, family members drowned, employment income disrupted, homes waiting for years for reparations.

Extreme weather extreme polarisation in human society. The rich can rebuild, those without serious wealth left to flounder. The media obsesses over the catastrophe hitting Hollywood celebrities, but says next to nothing of the far greater calamity that has engulfed the poor of the Carolinas following the record-breaking hurricanes, or indeed those flooded out in the same week in the South of Manchester, northern England and Wales.

The priorities of the Capitalist system are all wrong. We can spend billions on weapons of mass destruction but not have the infrastructure to put out forest fires of build flood defences. And TV news ensures both fires and floods receive far more airtime than the fires from the bombs raining down in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, nor the extreme weather flooding in the refugee camps created by the wars. In this age of catastrophe the media keeps us diverted and distracted from the reality.

Farmers report each morning of another 4cm of rain overnight, the crops destroyed weeks ago and the soil becoming unusable, devoid of substance and nutrients. Birds die in their hundreds of thousands, bees mistake the season and starve, the extreme switchback between sudden freeze and unseasonable heat tricking all plant life into false starts and destructive ends.

2024 was the hottest year in 100,000+ years. Unprecedented in modern human history, and trending hotter, faster.

The warming doesn’t necessarily make the weather sunnier but simply more extreme. We’re very wet then very cold then unseasonably hot within the same week. We are living in an historically unique era of rapid climate change, now called super-warming, all the environmental drivers accelerating beyond any accurate modelling. The authorities could be excused for being caught-out by the rapidity and chaos…were it not for the fact that all this was predicted decades ago. Not only were the true causes denied to ensure inaction, but today, the adaptations required to protect us all are not in place and probably too expensive to be rolled-out in time without a systemic change of priorities.

We’re on our own. Climate change is far more powerful than any war, but is producing more war as resources and food production are pushed to the limit. Climate change is far more disruptive than the wildest dreams the most deranged terrorist. Whilst humans have always migrated across the world, climate change is producing a scale of forced migration never before seen.

Governments and authorities pour tax money into subsiding farmers for activities that deny the fact of climate change. Governments increase military spending to eye-watering proportions and at the expense of social welfare and infrastructure. Taxes are raised to ensure subsidies to the fossil-fuel companies that are warming the atmosphere and oceans towards extinction.

Public money for transformation away from global heating emissions in time to stop social collapse is cutback and cut again and again. There’s no money at scale to address the depth of the climate crisis. Those of us who try to sound the alarm are damned as crazies or extremists, and falsely imprisoned on criminal charges that used to be used only for the most murderous villains.

Corporations invest, not on any products that can slow-down the rate of climate collapse, but on gambles about the new necessities that extreme weather will produce. The pharmaceutical companies are investing in the hope of the new pandemics and insect-borne diseases produced by the warming of the climate. Fossil fuel corporations are investing in more oil and gas fields on the basis that, well, it’s too late to worry about the coming collapse – make the cash while we can.

The ancient definition of madness is the condition where a human being is detached from reality and unable to understand or manage the world around them. It is in that sense that human society, Britain as a prime example, has descended into a collective madness. The degree of denial is the very definition of extreme disconnect. It seems the penny only drops when it’s too late – it is you who are flooded out, burned down, electricity cut-off, without staple foodstuffs, reliant on polluted water.

History has shown that social collapse, a condition of the sudden loss of all givens, takes between three and five days before the descent into dog-eat-dog survival. Prevention requires governments to have pre-prepared contingencies and effective call-up ready and in place “just in case”. Our experience of COVID-19 proved such preparation was not in place for a pandemic. This winter’s floods have proven, early-on, that the services that exist are quickly overwhelmed – rescue, medical and insurance services grossly insufficient.

When we say we need the economy shifted into a new set of priorities similar to when governments have to move into a “war-footing” we are sneered at and jeered. But not by those whose land is swamped, homes are destroyed, friends are drowned, income is ended by weather events. We should not have to wait until each of us is affected. The purpose of governments and the taxes they raise is to protect and resource. They are failing us, all of them, absolutely.